Big Eyes Is Yet Another Tim Burton Misfire

21 March 2015 | 11:39 am | Anthony Carew

We could call Tim Burton's latest a misfire but we'll just settle for shitty.

Big Eyes

Here she comes, Amy Adams, America’s Sweetheart, en route to the Golden Globes stage by way of yet another Tim Burton movie we could charitably describe as a ‘misfire’, but more aptly just call ‘shitty’. It wasn’t meant to be this way, of course: Big Eyes was to mark Burton’s return to non-branded, non-$200mil, non-Johnny Depp entertainment. Its true-life tale, of the painter Margaret Keane and the husband, Walter, who took credit for her work, found Burton reuniting with the screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who penned Ed Wood; and to that same milieu —absurd outsider-art kitsch in late-’50s Los Angeles— they once captured so tenderly.

It was enough for long-disenfranchised Burton fans to hold out hope. And the fact that it starred Adams — fresh off getting all Lady Macbeth and handjobby in an entirely different cinematic mid-century LA, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master — was both a blessing and, surely, a good sign for Big Eyes’ prospects.

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And Adams is, let’s admit, totally great in it: lighting up every frame she’s in, bringing real life to a character barely written in two dimensions. The greatness of her performance comes in spite of the material, but how clearly we can see it is moreso because of the material. Adams seems so singular, so brilliant, because she’s acting her ass off in such a piece of crap. Watching her at work, here, is like seeing Gary Ablett on the 2011 Suns: a transcendent talent trying to singlehandedly lift a doomed enterprise towards mere mediocrity.

When people try and rate Oscar-bait performances on degree-of-difficulty, they usually speak of ‘bravery’, of emotional vulnerability, of screen suffering, of weight loss, of impersonating a well-known public figure, of methoding-out, man. But being amazing in a film that isn’t sure seems like a hard feat to pull off, making Adams’ Golden Globe win —if you’re into the whole Hollywood back-patting awards-season circus — justly deserved.

Adams’ win was, notably, for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, which begs one key philosophical question: is Big Eyes supposed to be funny? Danny Huston does his smirking conniving creep thing; Jason Schwartzman his haughty, pretentious dickwad thing; and Christoph Waltz submits a kind of meta-ham performance, acting badly in playing a character who is going through life acting badly, a smarmy charlatan radiating insincerity with every over-eager smile, whilst fuming with red-faced fury in private. Each of these performances is, in its own way, utterly mugging, but I can’t imagine any of them making anyone really laugh.

In turn, Burton’s ultra-soft-lensed direction summons old melodramas and daytime soaps, Danny Elfman’s over-egged score is playful with an undercurrent of inspirational, and the drama plays out like so many grand movies with Oscar dreams: a downward spiral into the momentarily-dark put right by a just ending in which good triumphs.

There’s no hints that Burton is playing Atomic Age America for kitschy comedy, is authoring a satire on industrialised art production, is turning Waltz’s hopeless huckster into some tragic clown, a buffoon due to get his comeuppance after 90 minutes. There’s, of course, nothing of Burton’s celebrated Gothic style here, but there’s none of the gentle menace, either, the sense that something dark lurks beneath the façade of the American dream. You can’t tell if it’s a comedy because there’s never a singular sense of tone, anything that really holds, makes Big Eyes captivating.

After decades of blockbuster bloat, Burton seems to have little idea how to depict a human drama; how to find the true heart of a story set in recognisable reality. The characters are caricatures, the emotions ersatz, and, in the middle, Adams is, essentially, a cipher. In another film, her essential nothingness would be a shortcoming; here, it’s the only good thing. She’s the still point of a churning calamity, naturalism dropped into a pantomime, passivity played off against desperation; Adams artfully underselling her character’s creativity, her expression, her suffering. It’s a fine performance that, in a movie this bad, becomes absolutely magnetic.

Love Is Strange

The push for marriage equality is no attempted assault on the family, on romance, or on the cultural otherness of queerness. It’s really just about legal rights. And Love Is Strange opens with a New York couple (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina), four decades into an affair to echo across the ages, finally able to grant their shared union legally-acknowledged status.

In the film’s artful, sentimental beginnings, we’re immediately at the humble, sweet, non-society wedding of these long-time lovers. Writer/director Ira Sachs (fresh off Keep The Lights On’s searing queer drama) gives the mic to others — including the great Marisa Tomei — to let them testimonialise the great affair, trailing endlessly behind in the backstory. This gives the sense of real heft, and real weight, to the relationship, but also captures how a marriage is rarely about just the couple at its centre.

Friends and family have long lent on Lithgow and Molina, treated their relationship as a rock; their arty apartment a place to turn when the world seems unforgiving, their union a stable constant in an unstable world. But, once word of their marriage gets out, Molina loses his job as a choirmaster at a Catholic school, and their mythical apartment becomes a financially untenable proposition. Suddenly homeless, our central couple now needs to lean on others, driven apart right when the law’s finally allowed them to be together.

It’s a portrait, in many ways, of aging, of the way that longtime providers, once they become pensioners, need to be looked after. Their legal union comes at a symbolic time; its legally weight coming right as they need to start ordering their affairs with old age lingering. Love Is Strange is an ensemble piece — Tomei, husband Darren Burrows, and son Charlie Tahan hold as much of the story as anyone else — but Lithgow is its undeniable centre. He delivers a sterling turn as an artist whose joie de vivre remains intact even as his faculties start to decline; Lithgow’s bright, sad eyes capturing the internal turmoil of a man young-at-heart, but suddenly staring into inevitable, imminent oblivion.

The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Them

Ned Benson had one truly original cinematic idea: for his ambitious debut, he’d make a matching set of His and Hers dramas, each telling the tale of a relationship’s end from the perspective of its protagonists. They’d have different stories, different casts, different colour schemes, and, of course, those key Rashomon moments in which different characters remember the same event differently. They’d work as standalone features, or in concert with one another; and you could watch them in either order.

And so he made The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Him and The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Her. It was a piece of high-concept formalism that set its grieving-parents drama apart from its Sundancey, Oscar-bait peers. And, in its own way, it succeeded: what was remarkable was how much better Her was than Him, how they felt different, emotionally, to watch.

In the latter, James McAvoy plays a dick with a case of male victimisation: he a drunken, angry sadsack whose kid dies, whose wife leaves him, whose restaurant goes into the toilet, who gets punched in the face, who gets hit by a car. Woe is he. In the former, Jessica Chastian plays someone essentially restless, forging forth with life, sometimes whimsically, as a way of refusing to revel in the shit; to, perhaps, attempt to run away from the pain in her life.

These two films shared both differences and similarities, shared a slightly self-conscious air, and were both populated with lots of great actors: Viola Davis snarling and self-deprecating; Isabelle Huppert vague, lost, as if always daydreaming of lost; William Hurt an intellectual titan suddenly confronted with visceral emotion; Ciarán Hinds an aging, womanising asshole filled with self-loathing; the secretly-great Jess Weixler playing pluckishness and pathos beautifully; Katherine Waterston delivering one brilliant scene as an insufferable society cunt; and Bill Hader providing plentiful ammunition for those who think his dramatic crossover is dripping with real potential.

But, sadly, there wasn’t a way to maximise the monetisation of two separate art movies; no marketing-plan precedent for Benson’s original idea. And so, Harvey Weinstein — that villainous heel of the Oscar industry, an egotistical beancounter infamous for demanding auteurs cut down their films, then vindictively burying them if they don’t — came up with an unoriginal idea: chopping 190 minutes of two films into 120 minutes of one. And, with that, we get The Disappearance Of Eleanor Rigby: Them, a film in which what was interesting about the matching-pair movies is absent, lost in the need to normalise narrative. Benson had one truly original cinematic idea, and, suddenly, it was gone.

'71

There’s always something kinda-gross when morally/artistically-questionable filmmakers lean on real history, and real tragedy, as setting for their genre-movie entertainments. Enter Yann Demange, a French director whose TV history is rich in episodes of Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, working from a script by Gregory Burke called ’71.

Said script rewrites Carol Reed’s WW2-era classic Odd Man Out from the reverse: here giving us Jack O’Connell as an English soldier lost in Belfast at the height of the troubles, descending, across one terrifying night, into a noir-film darkness in which, increasingly wounded and delirious, he’s either helped or hunted by a host of locals, each with their own agenda.

The film — admirably, I suppose — attempts to pull back from his individual journey to look at a social cross-section of those dealing with life-under-occupation in different ways. But at its heart it’s an action movie, with all the gunfire and explosions and chase-scenes and villainy that implies; its central agenda that our ‘hero’ survives, no matter the price.